Slides from a presentation at a Festschrift for Murray Goot, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, December 2, 2014. Download: pdf

record last updated 6:47pm December 5, 2014

New data, new methods and new questions for Australian politics

Slides from keynote presentation delivered to the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Australian Society for Quantitative Political Science, University of Sydney, Dec 5 2014. Download: pdf

record last updated 3:43pm December 5, 2014

All that glitters: the betting markets and the 2013 Australian Federal election

Poll movements shape the betting markets, especially as the election draws close, and especially when the polls suggest the election might be closer than previously thought. Ahead of the 2013 Australian Federal election, Newspoll and Nielsen seem especially important "market movers", probably due to their long-standing brand power and their association with newspapers in multiple media markets. Betting markets react quickly to changes in the polls, but not instantaneously. Poll movements take at least 48 hours to be digested by the betting markets, suggesting that secondary media reports of the polls are important (e.g., evening TV news reports of poll results from that morning’s newspapers).
In a lop-sided election like 2013, we can expect that betting markets will react to little or no change in the polls,"catching up" with the polls in the final week of the campaign. That is, we should not to be surprised to see political betting markets reacting to polls. Rather, we should expect a somewhat subtle interplay between the two, as shown in the analyses presented here.
To appear in Carol Johnson and John Warhurst (eds), The 2013 Australian Federal Election: Australian National University Press: Canberra. Download: pdf

record last updated 4:17pm March 27, 2014

The Spatial Concentration of the Green Vote

Analysis of Green support by polling place, 2010 Australian Federal election, examining the high spatial concentration of the high levels of Green support. Download: pdf

record last updated 11:38pm September 13, 2010

Australians, Americans, and the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

Report on surveys fielded in Australia and the United States ahead of the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. The Australian fieldwork was commissioned by the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney; the U.S. fieldwork is part of the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (Lynn Vavreck of UCLA and I are the principal investigators). Download: PDF

record last updated 10:17am November 4, 2008

A shrinking Australian electoral roll?

with Peter BrentWe examine recent trends in electoral enrollment in Australia, which suggest that since the 2004 Federal election, enrollments have fallen as a share of the eligible population. Recent months have seen a marked increase in enrolment, but the disparity remains. We suggest some reasons as to why this has occured. Democratic Audit of Australia

record last updated 10:31am June 20, 2007

Pooling the Polls Over an Election Campaign

Poll results vary over the course of a campaign election and across polling
organisations, making it difficult to track genuine changes in voter support. I
present a statistical model that tracks changes in voter support over time by
pooling the polls, and corrects for variation across polling organisations due to
biases known as ‘house effects’. The result is a less biased and more precise
estimate of vote intentions than is possible from any one poll alone. I use five
series of polls fielded over the 2004 Australian federal election campaign
(ACNielsen, the ANU/ninemsn online poll, Galaxy, Newspoll, and Roy
Morgan) to generate daily estimates of the Coalition’s share of two-party
preferred (2PP) and first preference vote intentions. Over the course of the
campaign there is about a 4 percentage point swing to the Coalition in first
preference vote share (and a smaller swing in 2PP terms), that begins prior to
the formal announcement of the election, but is complete shortly after the
leader debates. The ANU/ninemsn online poll and Morgan are found to have
large and statistically significant biases, while, generally, the three phone polls
have small and/or statistically insignificant biases, with ACNielsen and (in
particular) Galaxy performing quite well in 2004. Australian Journal of Political Science. 2005. V40(4): 499-517. Replication archive and technical appendix available below. Download: zip

record last updated 1:36pm April 16, 2013

Incumbency Advantage and Candidate Quality

in Mortgage Nation: The 2004 Australian Election. Marian Simms and John Warhurst (eds). 2005. Perth, Western Australia: API Network/Curtin University of Technology. pp335-347.

record last updated 3:03pm January 31, 2006

Pooling and Smoothing the Polls Over an Election Campaign

slides from a talk given at the Seminar in Bayesian Inference in Econometrics and Statistics, Washington University in St Louis, August 1, 2005 Download: PDF

record last updated 8:47am August 2, 2005

Informal Voting in the 2004 Australian Election: a brief look at the aggregate data

multiple regression analysis of rates of informality in the 2004 Australian House of Representatives election; divisional level data; key predictors are non-English speaking at home, ballot length (and the interaction of the two), along with tertiary education and an indicator for divisions in jurisdictions with optional preferential voting in their legislative elections. Download: pdf

record last updated 3:54pm April 25, 2005

Howard, Bush and Mandates: the 2004 U.S. and Australian Elections Compared

Op-ed piece comparing the two conservative victories in the 2004 U.S. and Australian elections; submitted to Dissent (www.dissent.com.au) Download: PDF

record last updated 6:53pm February 16, 2005

Political Parties and Electoral Behaviour

The Cambridge Handbook of the Social Sciences in Australia. 2002. pp266-286.

record last updated 10:29pm November 12, 2004

Compulsory Voting

a contribution to the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Elsevier)

record last updated 1:21pm December 1, 2004

Estimating Ideological Locations in Australian Political Institutions

Slides from a presentation to the Annual Meeting of the Australasian Political Studies Association, Brisbane, September 2001. Download: PDF

record last updated 1:07pm December 1, 2004

Non-Compulsory Voting in Australia?: what surveys can (and can't) tell us

Electoral Studies. 1999. 18:29-48.

record last updated 10:31pm November 12, 2004

Pauline Hanson, the Mainstream, and Political Elites: the place of race in Australian political ideology.

1996 and 2001 Census data, aggregated to 2000 Commonwealth electoral divisions
(i.e., the division boundaries in place for the 2001 Federal election).
Sources detailed in Excel
workboook. Also available as a Stata
dta file.

2001 Federal
election results, House of Representatives, by
polling place

There
are few “conscience” votes in the Australian parliament
(members of parliament almost always vote as party blocs). A few years ago
I collected data on passage of the Euthanasia Laws Bill 1996 (the “Andrews
Bill”), a private member's bill to overrule a Northern Territory
statute permitting euthanasia. The vote on the 3rd reading (final passage)
of the bill in the House of Representatives (9 December 1996) is here as
a raw text
file.